Sky News: Daily Mail publisher set to rule out buying Express titles

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According to a report by Sky News City editor Mark Kleinman, the Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) will rule out buying any of Richard Desmond’s newspaper assets, which also include the Sunday Express and the Daily Star, following “preliminary talks between the two groups’ proprietors earlier this year”.

Kleinman said:

Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) will use its half-year results to tell the City that it has decided against adding to its collection of national newspapers.

Richard Desmond, chairman of Northern & Shell, which owns the Express and Daily Star, has asked Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, to sound out potential buyers of his newspaper assets, which he acquired about a decade ago.

Kleinman reported last month that the DMGT chairman had held talks with Desmond regarding a possible deal.

Today, he claimed Rothermere had been off by ‘both the asking price and the fact that it wants to deploy capital in other, faster-growing areas of its business”.